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hints to travellers. 
a Wolf was considered brother to a Wolf of any other tribe, and might 
not marry a Wolf girl, who was considered as his sister, but he might 
marry a Deer or a Heron. In contrast with such rules is the practice of 
endogamy, or “ marrying-in,” as among the Arab tribes, who habitually 
marry cousins. But it will be found that the two rules often go together, 
as where a Hindu must practically marry within his own caste, but at 
the same time is prohibited from marrying in his own gotra or clan. 
Researches into totem-laws are apt to bring the traveller into contact 
with other relics of the ancient social institutions in which these laws 
are rooted, especially the practice of reckoning descent not on the father’s 
side, as with us, but on the mother’s side, after the manner of the 
Lycians, whose custom seemed extraordinary to the Greeks in the time 
of Herodotus, but may be still seen in existence among native tribes of 
America or in the Malay islands. Even the system of relationship 
familiar to Europeans is far different from those of regions where forms 
of the “ classificatory system ” prevail, in which father’s brothers and 
mother’s sisters are called fathers and mothers. In inquiring into native 
laws of marriage and descent, precautions must be taken to ensure 
accuracy, and especially such ambiguous English words as “ uncle ” or 
“ cousin ” should be kept clear of. 
Another point on which travellers have great opportunity of seeing 
with their own eyes the working of primitive society is the holding and 
inheritance of property, especially land. Notions derived from our 
modern law of landlord and tenant give place in the traveller’s mind to 
older conceptions, among which individual property in land is hardly 
found. In rude society it is very generally the tribe which owns a dis¬ 
trict as common land, where all may hunt and pasture and cut fire-wood; 
while, when a family have built a hut, and tilled a patch of land round it, 
this is held in common by the family while they live there, but falls back 
into tribe-land if they cease to occupy it. This is further organised in 
what are now often called “ village communities,” which may be seen in 
operation in Russia and India, where the village fields are portioned out 
among the villagers. Those who have seen them can understand the 
many traces in England of the former prevalence of this system in 
" common fields,” &c. There is the more practical interest in studying 
the working of this old-world system from the light it throws on projects 
of communistic division of land, which in such villages may be studied, 
